Walid Ikhlassi evokes the individual's struggle for dignity and significance in the Syrian city of Aleppo during the French mandate of the forties and fifties. His characters' seeking of personal fulfillment parallels the struggle of the nation for self-definition. The changing political and cultural landscape of Syria challenges individuals in their attempts to live lives of integrity, as Ikhlassi provides analytical insights into the civil society of Syria, the axis of his writing.

From the boy Antara who personifies the Arab legend of a half-African slave warrior/hero to everyday...

Elder Tree embodies a lifetime of experience and observation, dream and fantasy, quest and discovery in the shape of the mystical elder. As the thirteenth and last tree of the Celtic tree calendar, the elder is associated with pain, dissolution, and death. It provided both the wood of the cross and the limb from which Judas hanged himself. But it is also a medicinal tree, source of many folk remedies. And as the tree of the Triple Goddess, its energies are feminine and committed to the blessings and beauties of incarnate life. So it is also a tree of healing, rebirth,...